Quebecers have the least personal contact with Jews or Muslims of any Canadians, and less contact means more intolerance, an analysis of poll data suggests.
Quebecers have the least personal contact with Jews or Muslims of any Canadians, and less contact means more intolerance, an analysis of poll data suggests.
The findings help explain why "reasonable accommodation" of orthodox Jews and Muslims is so controversial in this province, the Montreal research group that crunched the numbers says.
The Environics poll also reveals that, when it comes to Arabs and Jews, a small minority of Canadians are equal-opportunity bigots - they dislike both.
Muslims and francophones think the least well of Jews, and only one-third of Canadians think Jews and Arabs get along, the poll also suggests.
The results of the multiculturalism survey of 2,045 Canadians were released last month by the CBC. The new findings were arrived at when the Association for Canadian Studies took a deeper look at the data.
"This is a groundbreaking study - I've seen hundreds like it, but I've never see things displayed as categorically as this," association executive director Jack Jedwab said.
"It demonstrates unequivocally the importance of contact between communities. Without it, there's a less favourable relationship between communities," he said from Ottawa, where he was attending a conference on second-generation Canadians.
In Quebec, particularly outside Montreal, "the low level of contact, in part, explains the intercultural problems we see," like the rural town of Herouxville's declarations about devout Muslims, Jedwab added.
"A lot of the reasonable accommodation debate, I think, is rooted in this lack of contact. If you don't know somebody different, you tend to have a less favourable opinion of the group, according to this study."
The Environics study asked Canadians: "Do you personally have contact with members of the following groups?" It listed Jews, Muslims, blacks, Chinese, aboriginals, East Indians and Pakistanis, and asked how often there is contact: often, occasionally, rarely or never.
Overall, Canadians said they interact with blacks most - 69 per cent said they're in contact with them often or occasionally. Chinese were next (65 per cent), then East Indians and Pakistanis (54 per cent), aboriginals (54 per cent), Jews (50 per cent) and, last, Muslims (46 per cent).
But Quebecers stood out from the pack.
Here - where accommodation of Hasidic Jews in places like the Park Ave. YMCA, and devout Muslims in schools and even sugar shacks, are always in the news - it seems contact with Jewish people or Muslims is much rarer than elsewhere.
Only 35 per cent of Quebecers said they're in contact with a Muslim, and only 27 per cent with a Jew. (The lower figure for Jews could partly be because Jews don't always identify themselves as such.)
The proportion of Quebecers who have never had contact with a Jew or a Muslim is also surprisingly high - 47 per cent have never met a Jew and 44 per cent have never met a Muslim.
In Montreal, contact is more frequent (43 per cent have had contact with Jews, 54 per cent with Muslims), but is still much lower than in Toronto and Vancouver, where between 64 and 72 per cent of respondents know a Jew or a Muslim.
The data also strongly suggest that Canadians' level of esteem for minorities rises the more they're in contact with them. For example, almost half of francophones who've never met a Jew say they don't like them, compared with an 80-per-cent approval rating from francophones who interact with them often.
The Environics poll also found a majority of Canadians who support banning the hijab (the Arab-Muslim head scarf) don't like Arabs to begin with. Between 53 and 60 per cent of people who dislike Arabs said a hijab ban is a good idea.
A small minority of Canadians have a "very unfavourable" opinion of Jews (three per cent) and Arabs (five per cent). In Quebec, the antipathy is twice as high, though: According to the poll, seven per cent are against Jews and 10 per cent are against Arabs.
The poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 8-30. Because of the large number of people interviewed, its margin of error is low: 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The release of the data yesterday was timed to coincide with UNESCO's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, held every March 21 to commemorate the massacre in 1960 of unarmed protesters in Sharpeville, South Africa.
Source : The Gazette (Montreal) March 2007
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